Privacy Policy

Data Protection

The Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM) takes the protection of personal data very seriously. We want you to know when and what data we collect and how we use it. We have taken technical and organisational measures to ensure that we respect the rules on data protection.

Data protection questions

BAM’s Data Protection Representative ensures full compliance with our data protection policy. If you have any questions about data protection, please contact us. BAM reserves the right to change this data protection statement.

Personal data

Personal data is data that can be used to establish your identity. This includes information such as your name, address, postal address, telephone number. Data that is not associated with your identity (such as the number of users of the site) is not covered. You can use our online offers without disclosing your identity.

When you order information material, newsletters or brochures, or subscribe to a BAM forum, we ask for your name and other personal data. It is your decision whether you enter this data. By entering your data, you give your consent to its purpose-related use. We save your data on specially protected servers in Germany. Access is restricted to only a few specifically authorised persons who are involved in the servers’ technical, commercial or editorial support.

We retain your data only as long as necessary for the purpose-related use. For example, your data will be deleted when you unsubscribe to a newsletter or after we send you any requested information material.
Every time you visit our website, data is saved for statistical and security purposes. The collected data is solely used to improve our internet service and cannot be traced back to you.

In the event of serious breaches against our terms of use and unauthorised access or attempted access to our servers, we reserve the right to use personal data to find/identify those who committed the breach based on their use of certain data records.

Disclosure of personal data to third parties

We use your personal data in the case of information requests only within BAM and those companies commissioned to dispatch the material. We do not pass on your data to third parties without your explicit consent.
If a court order or law requires us to, we will transfer your data to authorised bodies.

Data protection statement for social media

BAM takes the current debate on data protection in social networks very seriously. It is currently not legally and conclusively clarified whether and to what extent all networks offer their services in line with European data protection laws.

The videos included in our online offer can be found at https://www.youtube.com. Please note that YouTube uses a data-upload plug-in, so to prevent your data from being uploaded to the YouTube server as soon as you access the BAM page, you will be asked for your consent to allow it to be forwarded to YouTube. This conforms to the YouTube/Google data protection regulations. The upload plug-in is only activated after clicking on ‘agree once’ or ‘agree always’. The connection is then established to the servers (known as a 2-click solution). If you use the ‘agree always’ function, your decision will be saved as a cookie in your browser.

We expressly highlight that Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube save user data (for example, personal information, IP address, etc.) in accordance with their own data use policy and use it for business purposes. You can obtain information about the social networks’ data management policies at the following links: Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube.

BAM does not have any influence over the collection of data and its use by the social networks. We do not know to what extent, where and for how long the data is saved, how the networks’ existing deletion obligations are fulfilled or even what kind of assessments and links have been made based on the data and to whom the data has been disclosed.

Analysis services

Our website uses the Piwik web analysis service to analyse web visitors. Piwik uses "cookies", which are text files saved on your computer and enable us to analyse the use of individual websites. To this end, the usage information generated by the cookie is transferred to our server and saved for usage analysis that helps to optimise our website. Your IP address is anonymised immediately in this process so that you will remain anonymous as a user to us. The information generated by the cookie about your use of this website will not be disclosed to third parties. You may disable the use of cookies by adjusting your browser settings, but this may have the consequence that you may not be able to use all features of this website. These cookies expire after 13 months.

If you do not agree with us saving and analysing any data from your visit, you can withdraw by clicking the link below at any time. In this case, a so-called opt-out cookie is saved in your browser with the result that Piwik does not collect any session data. Warning: if you delete your cookies, this has the consequence that the opt-out cookie will also be deleted and you may have to re-activate it.

Deactivating Piwik

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BAM is a senior scientific and technical federal institute with responsibility
to the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy